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Helpers

Contextual help

There are extensive help screens for all drawing tools and all windows. By default, the associated key is F1. If a specific window was open, it will show the explanations about this window. When no window is open, and your mouse cursor is positioned over one of the buttons of the toolbar, it will show the help for this tool (and/or the related options window)
The help screens also show the current keyboard shortcuts, and allow you to change them immediately.

Keyboard shortcuts

There are more than a hundred actions which can have a shortcut key. As soon as you have found the functions you use a lot, it’s recommended to check the associated shortcut key, this can save you a lot of back-and-forth between the toolbar and the drawing area. If the default key combination doesn't suit you, redefine it.

To view a shortcut, open the relevant page of contextual help: the highlighted key names are the actual shortcuts with your current configuration. Click the name to edit the shortcut.

Some shortcuts which are often useful:

Scroll picture : cursor arrows

Magnifier : M

Zoom in/out when magnified : + and -

Grab brush : B

Choose single-pixel brush : DEL

Color picker : ~

Swap pages : TAB

The keys SHIFT, ALT, CONTROL, and META (on Mac) can be used to make more combinations – so you can’t associate anything to “just Shift”.

With a wheel mouse, you can also associate shortcuts to the third button (“Mouse3”), and to WheelUp and WheelDown. Again, Control, Shift etc. can be used to make more combinations. You can set at most 2 key combinations for the same shortcut, so for example you can associate both ~ and Mouse3 to the Colorpicker tool.

Use the spare page to store parts you will need later

The spare page is very handy to store pieces of your main image. For example you can pick a part of your image with the rectangular brush tool, paste it somewhere in the spare over a solid color background, clean out the background (still on the spare) until it has just the contour you need, then grab it again, and switch back to the original Main page: you will have a clean brush with no leftover pixels, that you can paste anywhere.

Use the color picker

There is a color picker tool (also called pipette) to pick a color from the picture. By default the shortcut is the easy-to-reach ~ key. Using it can spare a lot of time, especially when your palette has more colors than can be displayed in the toolbar’s palette.
While the tool is active, you have a specific mouse cursor, and the status bar displays both the color you’re currently highlighting and its RGB values. Click with left mouse button to pick

Magnifier (Zoom)

A magnifier is available to zoom in on your picture. It’s very useful to draw on detailed parts of picture, without needing extreme mouse precision, and easier on your eyes.
Activate it or disable by clicking the magnifying glass icon.

While active, your editing area is split in two, with the normal view on the left and the zoomed-in part on the right. You can drag the separator bar to adjust the proportions.
You can draw in either areas, both update in real time.

If the mouse cursor is over the picture when you use the keyboard shortcut of the magnifier (default: M), Grafx2 instantly zooms and centers the zoomed part on the place where your mouse cursor was.

By default, the cursor arrows are used to scroll the zoomed area around.

I made a mistake: Undo / Redo

Your drawing actions are memorized, so you can easily Undo any number of drawing steps, and Redo them if you go too far in history. A single step is generally all the changes you do from the moment you click on the picture, to the moment you release the mouse button.

To Undo or Redo, click the “Oops” with the left mouse button and the right mouse button, respectively.

The maximum number of steps that can be recorded is in the settings, you can go up to 99.

The system uses a circular buffer, so it behaves a bit different from usual: When you Undo until you reach the oldest step and then Undo once more, you’re back on the more recent step.